Reading Catholic Segmentation

Dear Stan,

Many thanks for the blog update! Yes, the photo shows the sanctuary of St William of York - amazing. The composition does not extend to floor level, so you can't see the temporary wooden platform erected over the main sanctuary floor.

HERE'S A LINK to our two churches on which you'll find the latest bulletin with Mass schedules.

You will see that St William has a 3:00pm Hungarian Mass, on top of the 900am English, 1100am Latin and 600pm University. St James is hosting the Ukrainian Mass. For many years St James also hosted the regular Polish Masses, until 1981 when the Poles acquired their own church, few hundred yards to the south.

This "new" Sacred Heart was the former Anglican church of St John. It is a fine Victorian structure, sited in what is now designated as a historical conservation area. But the Anglican authorities were determined to demolish it and sell the site for development. The Poles and the Reading Victorian Society joined forces to fight this act of vandalism. The Anglican authorities actually obtained legal permission to demolish St John....until some wily legal eagle pointed out that they had only obtained permission to demolish the church, not the surrounding wall. And, until the wall was demolished, they could hardly get the heavy equipment in to demolish the church. At which point, rather than go through more legal exercises, the authorities surrendered and sold St John to the Poles at a very low price.

With the mass invasion of Poles in the last 5 years, Sacred Heart is packed to the doors for 4 Masses every weekend. But,even though it lies well within St James' parish boundary, it might hardly exist as far as the "English" parish is concerned. You can see that it is not mentioned on the website or newsletter. And, despite the usual bureaucratic obsession with Mass attendance statistics, which you can see in the Blackfen parish articles you sent me, the very healthy Mass attendance at Sacred Heart does not appear in the Portsmouth diocesan statistics.

Despite the never ending propaganda about Christian Unity we have had for the last 45 years, these examples from churches within a two mile radius of Reading town centre give you a taste of the practical fragmentation of Catholics into multiple sub-congregations divided by language and liturgical preference. As I said in an earlier post, the logical end result would be the Protestant situation of every person being his/her own Pope and congregation.